[317070]

I feel that the main thing I got from the book is that it made me settle and accept that there is no truth to be had. That the main narratives are much less truthy than I expected. There really is much more diversity in how humans were structured than we can phantom, or reliably reconstruct from the evidence. That is why having a wider spectrum of narratives is more important if you want to learn from the past.

While I knew many of the points and facts in the book, somehow that realization had never stuck before.

History was written be the victors, pre-history even more so. The first chapters have a good point, which gets clearer later on in the book. Much of the historic narrative has been coloured by the way Eurasia thinks in the last 500 years.

And it is stuff I kind of knew or suspected, now I really internalised the idea because of the book. The main idea is obvious in retrospect.

[zozbot234]

> There really is much more diversity in how humans were structured.

There was diversity, but given behavioral modernity and a sufficient resource surplus, complex social organization seems to have been something close to a human universal. Graham Hancock has pointed out that prehistoric people were capable of large-scale infrastructure projects the remains of which have survived in some form to the present day - and that implies some combination of effective hierarchical organization (required to coordinate the effort of significant numbers of people, well beyond the scale of a single band or troop) and long-term time orientation.